Personal Identity

I explored several different ideas when brainstorming for a mark that could represent myself as a designer. I wanted something very simple and very powerful. Ultimately, I settled on a hand + spiral combination. I envisioned it as a modern re-imagining of the prehistoric and very familiar hand + spiral motif. I love the symbolism of the hand. To me, it represents a means of communication and creation—the act of making things, which is essentially what I do as a designer. In relation, I was also drawn to the word "feel," and the potential of it's double meaning—the physical act of touching/connecting by hand, and also the more emotional and intuitive meaning, whereby objects and ideas, especially in the design world, are often judged based on how they feel, or whether or not they feel right. In fact, I originally used the phrase design to feel to represent myself, but ultimately decided it was too abstract and wasn't necessary. The spiral is also something that appealed to me. It's an ancient symbol that can represent life, time, and continuity. It's also an interesting and very attractive object to look at.The marriage of a very ancient, organic, and humanistic motif (hand + spiral) with that of a very modern, geometric, and logical physicalityseemed like an appropriate duality with which to represent myself.

Sketchbook explorations

Original breakdown of mark structure

Final full-color logo

Color variations, which change from time to time.

Mark construction

Full-color logo with free space.

Being an appreciater of minimalism (and an amateur web designer), I wanted my portfolio website to be simple and beautiful, so as to better display my work. I have also recently developed a wordpress blog to match the look of my website.

When I initially developed my new identity as a senior Visual Communication student, I became over-ambitious and spent a lot of money on a lot of fancy letterpress business cards. Fast forward to one year later and I've got 400 business cards with outdated and totally useless information. My next round of business cards I decided to go the cheaper, DIY route using rubber stamps. The downside, of course, is that I can't match exact colors, and in fact it's difficult to use even more than one color at a time. The upside is that they were relatively inexpensive, fun to create, and would prevent me from ending up with a giant surplus of cards.

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I explored several different ideas when brainstorming for a mark that could represent myself as a designer. I wanted something very simple and very powerful. Ultimately, I settled on a hand + spiral combination. I envisioned it as a modern re-imagining of the prehistoric and very familiar hand + spiral motif. I love the symbolism of the hand. To me, it represents a means of communication and creation—the act of making things, which is essentially what I do as a designer. In relation, I was also drawn to the word "feel," and the potential of it's double meaning—the physical act of touching/connecting by hand, and also the more emotional and intuitive meaning, whereby objects and ideas, especially in the design world, are often judged based on how they feel, or whether or not they feel right. In fact, I originally used the phrase design to feel to represent myself, but ultimately decided it was too abstract and wasn't necessary. The spiral is also something that appealed to me. It's an ancient symbol that can represent life, time, and continuity. It's also an interesting and very attractive object to look at.
The marriage of a very ancient, organic, and humanistic motif (hand + spiral) with that of a very modern, geometric, and logical physicality seemed like an appropriate duality with which to represent myself.